Free Choice

“The Ninth Day” and “Madagascar.”

As everyone knows, John Wayne always played John Wayne. He was terrific at it, but it was a limited role. Given his bulk and his peculiar ambulatory sway, could it have been any different? There are other kinds of actors, of course, for whom anatomy is not necessarily destiny, and they can do anything. So far, it’s hard to tell which category the German actor Ulrich Matthes belongs to. He’s certainly very talented, yet it is hard to imagine this slender, hawk-faced, haunted-looking man appearing in a light comedy or a German-language remake of “On the Town.” Like Wayne, Matthes may be predestined to play the same kind of role over and over—in his case, a fanatic burning with anguish and intellectual fire. Matthes, who is active in the theatre in Berlin and Vienna as well as in movies, was Joseph Goebbels in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s recent “Downfall,” and now, reversing ideological garments, he plays a heroic and brilliant anti-Nazi priest in Volker Schlöndorff’s fascinating “The Ninth Day.” In both roles, Matthes has a spooked, black-eyed stare that exposes the whites above his irises—the natural expression of characters who may be mad, or who may simply think and feel more than ordinary mortals. Beneath the eyes, expansive cheekbones traverse his face like battlements, giving way, alarmingly, to long planes coursing downward to a sharp chin. The late Klaus Kinski had a similar kind of gargoyle strangeness and fervor, but Kinski was a noisy showoff. By contrast, when Matthes stares, he seems to be looking inward. There’s something disturbing, even uncanny, about him—he could be one of El Greco’s saints.

“The Ninth Day,” written by Eberhard Görner and Andreas Pflüger, is based on the diary of Father Jean Bernard, a real-life hero of wartime Luxembourg. Bernard made movies for the International Catholic Film Organization before the war and edited the Luxemburger Wort, a daily newspaper, after it; eventually, he became the Bishop of Luxembourg. Bernard, I suspect, was a more worldly, pleasure-loving, and wily figure than Henri Kremer (as he is called here), the self-tormenting man played by Matthes. As the filmmakers tell it, in the dreadful winter of 1942 Kremer, along with anti-Nazi priests from all over occupied Europe, is interned at a special barracks in Dachau. Suddenly, he is sent home on a nine-day leave. In Luxembourg, a shrewd young S.S. officer named Gebhardt (August Diehl) takes control of him and tries to use him to bring around Luxembourg’s anti-Nazi bishop. If Kremer can get the bishop to declare his support for the Third Reich, he will not have to return to the camp. The pressures are ferocious: Gebhardt threatens to have Kremer’s family and the dissident clerics interned in Dachau killed. In the inimitable Nazi style, the S.S. has done its best to eliminate the possibility of individual martyrdom and even moral choice (Kremer will incur guilt whatever he does). The priest hates the Nazis; he’s enraged and intransigent, but he’s also, as Gebhardt learns, mortified by his own survival. Words are dangerous in these situations, and at times Kremer says very little, but Matthes works out the tensions physically. A humble-looking figure in a black flat-brimmed padre’s hat, he attains the illimitable power of fanaticism.

Schlöndorff, born in 1939, kicked off the New German Cinema back in 1966 with his sinister adaptation of Robert Musil’s novel “Young Törless.” The German movement has long since declined, but Schlöndorff seems to have survived intact. He has specialized in political films (“The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum,” “Circle of Deceit,” “Legend of Rita”) and literary adaptations (of Proust and Günter Grass, among others). Some of his movies have been didactic and heavy-footed, but not “The Ninth Day.” This film is powerful, concise, fully sustained. In movies, the concentration camps have been dramatized so often that further representation of them threatens to become kitsch, but Schlöndorff, working in brief strokes, rapidly sets up the world of labor, brutality, and death without resorting to cliché. For American audiences, he has a new subject: the sufferings of the anti-Nazi Catholic clergy. Banding together in the camp, the men, from different countries, speak in Latin and celebrate Mass whenever they can, but the Nazis’ cruelties are so extreme that some of them wonder if God has not forsaken them. “The Ninth Day” is a very bleak movie, but it has its own kind of mournful beauty. In the midwinter grayness of northern Europe—not a trace of red or blue anywhere—the light seems to have gone out, but at least one soul burns with an almost phosphorescent brightness.

“The Ninth Day” is a full-scale production, but the center of the movie is a series of theological disputes between Kremer and his S.S. keeper. August Diehl, who is large, handsome, and very young, makes Gebhardt an intelligent and desperate figure, a man who almost became a priest himself and whose compensatory fervor for the Reich has grown as great as Kremer’s fervor for God. He is a tempter, telling the priest that Judas is the secret hero of the Gospels—by betraying Jesus he set up the Crucifixion and man’s eventual salvation. In the same way, Kremer’s capitulation will allow the Christian Reich to defeat the godless Bolshevik hordes. During the war, the Nazis approached the Vatican with similar arguments, so Gebhardt’s brief is no trivial matter. Finding a way to resist this sophistry, the harrowed Kremer at last allows himself the sinful pride of anger. At the end, Matthes’s eyes change focus, and, for once, instead of looking inward, he stares the Devil right in the face.

In the animated feature “Madagascar,” Marty (Chris Rock), a zebra in the old Central Park Zoo (back when it had more exotic fare than sea lions and polar bears), is suffering from wanderlust. At night, he hears “Born Free” playing through his dreams as he gambols on the savannas of some imagined paradise. In the morning, however, he’s stuck in the zoo, along with his lion friend, Alex (Ben Stiller), who roars for children and waves his paws at them. Alex is a trouper; he’s quite comfortable doing a couple of shows a day for tourists as long as he gets a large steak afterward. Neither he nor Melman (David Schwimmer), a hypochondriac giraffe who fusses over his medication, has any desire to leave captivity. Looking after these quarrelsome friends, the brisk and commonsensical hippo Gloria (Jada Pinkett Smith) keeps the peace. But one night Marty bolts and roams the city, and the other three follow, hoping to retrieve him. Through circumstances you would rather not hear about, these four friends—representative New Yorkers—wind up in the jungle of Madagascar. Marty’s dream of freedom has come true.

Overcivilized mammals in the tangled wilderness: the comic premise of DreamWorks’ new movie is a perfectly feasible one. And the computer animation, which offers shadows and both focussed and unfocussed areas of the frame (just like a real-life film), is often quite beautiful. But “Madagascar,” which was directed by Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath, is mismanaged pretty much from start to finish. The filmmakers decided to make the action more cartoonish than that of such recent animated features as “Finding Nemo” and the “Shrek” films, with crashes and collapses and necks and bodies stretched out of shape. But when you resort to slapstick you run into trouble sustaining a full-length narrative. “Madagascar” is only eighty-six minutes long, but a lot of it feels padded. Like children who tell a successful joke, then tell it again, the filmmakers repeat every gag and visual trope three times. The picture takes forever to get going and then stalls repeatedly. On the beach at Madagascar, Marty and his friends hassle one another for a long time. At last, they pull themselves together and go into the interior, where they meet the natives—lemurs, led by King Julien XIII (Sacha Baron Cohen, a.k.a. Ali G.)—and they get a taste of the unspeakable Foosas, hyena-like creatures who scare everybody to death. But then, after all that, the New Yorkers go back to the beach and start wrangling all over again. This zebra does too much horsing around.

The classic shape of a children’s tale, as I recall it from reading a million of them to my boys, consists of removing a child or an animal from a situation of safety, placing him in danger, and then resolving the tensions and returning him to safety. “Madagascar” seems to offer the right dangers—the four friends will never get their Sunday Times and bagels in the wild. In response, they could have used their peculiar New York skills to deal with the creeping and crawling terrors of the great outdoors—and the premise would have worked out in a way that was both scary and funny. But nothing like that happens. When the kvetching New Yorkers hit the jungle, a few cobwebs cling to Alex, the hyenas turn out to be pussycats, and that’s it. Great visuals, lousy plot. After you see “Madagascar,” you start to think that the movies are being dumbed down even for small children. ♦

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.